Kolmanskop
Interesting facts
- The town takes its name from a transport driver, Johnny Coleman, who abandoned his ox wagon on a small rise nearby during a sandstorm.
- Fresh water was shipped about 1,000 km from Cape Town to Lüderitz and hauled inland, so precious that each resident had a strict daily ration.
- The town's ice factory froze blocks with ammonia refrigeration and handed each household a free half block of ice a day, along with lemonade and soda water.
- Kolmanskop was the terminus of electric narrow-gauge mining railways; one, completed in 1913, ran 119 km south via Pomona to Bogenfels.
- That southern line survived only two years before South African troops destroyed it in 1915 during the First World War.
- The railways drew power from a 1.5-megawatt station in Lüderitz, then believed to be the largest power plant in Africa.
- Rare brown hyenas now use the crumbling houses for shelter, roaming the streets of the abandoned town.
- The ghost town served as the main setting for the 2000 film The King Is Alive, and parts of the 2024 series Fallout were filmed in the area.
- The cover of Tame Impala's 2020 album The Slow Rush was photographed by Neil Krug in Kolmanskop.
- The site is managed today by Namdeb, a diamond company owned jointly by the Namibian government and De Beers.
Why it is worth it
Zacharias Lewala, a railway worker clearing sand off the tracks near Lüderitz in 1908, pulled a strange stone out of the dust and handed it to his German supervisor, August Stauch. Stauch had no training in gemology, just a hunch worth following up — and the test came back positive. Lewala was never paid for the find; the diamond rush that followed built an entire town out of nothing in one of the driest deserts on the planet within a few short years.
What rose on that dune wasn't a mining camp so much as an outpost of Wilhelmine Germany dropped into the Namib. By 1912 Kolmanskop was producing close to a tenth of the world's diamonds by weight, and the wealth showed: a ballroom with a stage, a casino, a school, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, and — stranger than all of it — a hospital holding the first X-ray machine in the southern hemisphere. It wasn't there for broken bones. Workers were routinely X-rayed to check whether they had swallowed or hidden stones before leaving the compound, an early and uneasy pairing of medical technology with industrial policing.
The boom didn't survive the decade that followed. In 1928, prospectors found even richer diamond terraces further south along the beaches near the mouth of the Orange River, and the mining company simply relocated its operation. Kolmanskop emptied house by house through the 1930s and 40s; the last residents were gone by 1956. No one bothered to tear the buildings down — the desert has been doing that work instead, and today sand dunes spill knee-deep through open doorways and bury the floors of rooms still papered in faded green and blue.
Good to know
The site sits inside what was once the Sperrgebiet, the diamond company's restricted zone, and is still only accessible on a paid permit through guided or self-guided tours arranged from Lüderitz — there's no simply driving up.
Getting there
10 km from Lüderitz. Luderitz Airport (LUD) is about 2 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the Namib in southern Namibia, 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) inland from the port town of Lüderitz. It was named after a transport driver named Johnny Coleman who, during a sand storm, abandoned his ox wagon on a small incline opposite the settlement. Once a small but very rich mining village, it is now a popular tourist destination run by Namdeb, a joint firm owned by the Namibian government and De Beers.
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